It's panto season and our footie leaders need a boot up the farce

IT'S been a week of slapstick thanks to the people in charge of our game and clubs.

Stewart Regan and George Peat were all smiles when the former was appointed as chief of the SFA

ALL we need now is John Barrowman and his horse from Jack and the Beanstalk because Scottish football’s panto season has gone into an extended run over the subject of league reconstruction.

Not by public demand, more like public disorder.

And the stars of the production are high-profile figures who should know better instead of acting like people who have only just discovered two twelves equals three eights.

Burns Night is just around the corner and Rabbie’s line about having the gift to see ourselves as others see us looks a perfect fit for what’s going on.

Englishman Barry Hearn knows what he’s talking about when it comes to reviving ailing sporting ventures – and he hit the nail on the head this weekend when he said Scottish football has lost any true sense of itself.

And here’s the cast of our very own pantomime to prove it.

Enter stage left the former SFA president George Peat to tell us part of the problem is that Stewart Regan doesn’t understand the Scottish scene because he’s an outsider.

This will be the same uncle George who head-hunted then appointed Englishman Regan as the SFA’s chief executive.

And the same one who’s an honorary vice president of the Association and a sitting member of the SFA Council.

So much for unity is strength and is it fair to ask if this unfamiliarity with Scotland and its strange ways didn’t come up during the course of Regan’s job interview with Peat?

But why did Regan then feel the need to retaliate in print after Peat had personalised the issue of his competence?

That was ill-timed and allowed suggestions that he was being visibly thin-skinned in a business where the hide of a rhinoceros is the main requirement.

Telling us he has done more for Scottish football in the last two years than had been managed in the previous 20 isn’t what anyone needs to hear when the three ruling bodies have accepted the game is at its lowest ebb.

But, wait a minute, up from the trap door in centre stage comes Charles Green to flog the deadest of dead horses and tell us Rangers will be looking for the road out of Scotland if 12-12-18 becomes a reality.

Call me an old cynic but would that headline-grabbing sound bite have been intended to steal Celtic’s thunder on the day they were announcing a new shirt sponsorship deal?

You’d be forgiven for thinking Charles had a former journalist advising him on the dark arts of stealing a back page from under a rival’s noses. The fact is Green knows he’s going nowhere anytime soon – but the sabre rattling does wonders for the Rangers supporters he needs to keep assembling in their tens of thousand at Ibrox.

Crowds are high but so are his overheads and season-ticket prices have been pitched at Third Division level.

Green needs to play the downtrodden card as an insurance policy for the day when he announces a price hike and needs the would-be oppressed to go along with it.

Reassessing what the game as a whole needs wasn’t really uppermost in his mind when he let fly with his fantasy about playing elsewhere.

Driving a nail into Rangers’ bubble was what Peter Lawwell seemed to have in mind when he used his sponsorship press conference to say Celtic didn’t miss Rangers.

“You miss the pros and not the cons so it balances itself out,” he said. “But you wouldn’t swap it for the Champions League.”

That’s a European tournament, Charles. The kind you can’t play in for a few years. You can take that dagger out your back now.

The game misses Celtic and Rangers being in the same division and all of this playing to the gallery doesn’t mask the commercial truth of that fact.

But that, and every other issue relative to the game’s well being, is becoming overshadowed by grandstanding, showboating and personal agendas.

By the time the SPL clubs meet on January 28 we need to get back to what’s best for the common good. Fans want a top league of 16 but any chairman will tell you it leads to too many meaningless matches at the end of the season and a drop in attendances.

If 12-12-18 is adopted it will be because there’s no better alternative. But if as few as seven SFL clubs vote against it then we’re back to square one.